WEBSTER CENTENNIAL. SPEECH AT THE BANQUET OF THE MARSHFIELD CLUB, JANUARY 18, 1882. I WOULD most gladly have been exempted, Mr. President, from this call, even at the cost of all the compliments by which it has been accompanied. I heartily wish that I were in a better condition for making any adequate response. I am conscious that such occasions belong to younger men; and I thought that I had made an unalterable resolution, after Yorktown, that I would render myself responsible for no more public addresses. And I can honestly say that no other occasion than this would have brought me out to-night. But I could not find it in my heart to excuse myself from dining here, albeit for the first time, with the Marshfield Club, at their most kind invitation, in honor of the centennial birthday of one with whom I had so many personal and so many public and so many proud associations for a quarter of a century, and who by his life and death and burial, has made Marshfield a name and a place never to be forgotten in the annals of our country or of the world. How could I ever forget those delightful days which I spent there with him forty years ago, more or less! His matchless form rises to my eye at this moment, as he welcomed the British minister and myself at his door on a midsummer morning, clad in his favorite rustic suit, with the broad-brimmed white hat overshadowing that Olympian brow, just as he may be seen in one of the most characteristic of his familiar portraits. He was a subject for Rembrandt on that morning, and Rembrandt never had a subject more worthy of his magic brush. I remember well how proudly he treated us to fish of his own catching, to game of his own shooting, to beef or mutton of his own raising, and to vegetables of every sort from his own gardens, with nothing on his table from any other source except the delicious Black Hamburgs which grand old Colonel Perkins, his lifelong and devoted friend, had just sent him from his green-house at Brookline. But his own presence and his own conversation were the choicest luxuries we enjoyed. He was not always gracious in society, and at other people's tables on ceremonious occasions he was sometimes reserved and moody. But he was the very prince of hosts at his own board; on that occasion, certainly, his rich reminiscences and sparkling anecdotes "Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine." And then I remember his taking us out to see the results of an experiment he was trying on the different fertilizers for his fields, pointing us to four carefully measured and exactly equal areas of Indian corn, one of them served with guano, one with kelp, one with fish from his own shores, and one with the common manure from his own barns; but he was as conservative in his agriculture as he was in his politics, and unhesitatingly gave the palm to the old-fashioned article. On that day he was eminently and exclusively the farmer of Marshfield, discoursing on soils and climates, on English farming and Scotch farming, as if they had been the sole study of his life, and careful for nothing but his crops and his cattle. And now, my friends, how shall I go on to speak of him more generally, or how can I hope to say anything about him which has not again and again been better said by others? Webster has long ago been the subject of as glowing and as exhaustive tributes as can be found in the English language. Nobody but he himself could surpass the tributes which his career has called forth from a hundred pens and lips. We have become accustomed of late to great public manifestations at the death of our illustrious men. But Webster's death thirty years ago, gave occasion to lamentations throughout the land, which no one then living and now living will have forgotten. Every press, every platform, almost every pulpit, poured forth strains of the most impressive eulogy. Living and dead he has been the theme of the most eloquent orators, of the most faithful and loving biographers, of the most accomplished essayists of our land. Everett and Choate and Hillard, as you have said, and President Felton of Harvard, and President Woods of Bowdoin, and, more recently, Mr. Evarts, to name no others, - have found in him the inspiration of some of their most celebrated efforts. I thank you for reminding the company that I united with Mr. Evarts, four or five years ago, in a sincere and earnest attempt to say of him whatever was truest and best, at the unveiling of that grand, heroic statue in Central Park, presented to the city of New York so munificently by one whom we are all glad to see present on this occasion. There is nothing which I desire to alter in that tribute, and there is but little for me to add.1 And after all, Mr. President, what are all the fine things. which have ever been said of him, or which ever can be said of him, to-night or a hundred years hence, compared with the splendid record which he has left of himself as an advocate in the courts, as a debater in the senate, as an orator before the people? We do not search out for what was said about Pericles or Demosthenes or Cicero or Burke. It is enough for us to read their orations. There are those indeed, who may justly desire to be measured by the momentary opinions which others have formed and expressed about them. There are not a few who may well be content to live on the applauses and praises which their efforts have called forth from immediate hearers and admirers. They will enjoy at least a reflected and traditional fame. But Webster will always stand safest and strongest on his own showing. His fame will be independent of praise or dispraise from other men's lips. He can be measured to his full altitude, as a thinker, a writer, a speaker, only by the standard of his own immortal productions. That masterly style, that pure Saxon English, that clear and cogent statement, that close and clinching logic, that power of going down to the depths and up to the heights of any great argument, letting the immaterial or incidental look out for itself, those vivid descriptions, those magnificent metaphors, those thrilling appeals, not introduced as mere 1 Winthrop's Addresses and Speeches, Vol. III. p. 436. ornaments wrought out in advance and stored up for an opportunity of display, but sparkling and blazing out in the very heat of an effort, like gems uncovering themselves in the working of a mine, these are some of the characteristics which will secure for Webster a fame altogether his own, and will make his works a model and a study long after most of those who have praised him, or who have censured him, shall be forgotten. What if those six noble volumes of his were obliterated from the roll of American literature and American eloquence! What if those great speeches, recently issued in a single compendious volume, had no existence! What if those consummate defences of the Constitution and the Union had never been uttered, and their instruction and inspiration had been lost to us during the fearful ordeal to which that Constitution and that Union have since been subjected! Are we quite sure that we should have had the Constitution, as it was, and the Union, as it is, to be fought for, if the birth we are commemorating had never occurred, if that bright Northen Star had never gleamed above the hills of New Hampshire? Let it be, if you please, that its light was not always serene and steady. Let it be that mist and clouds sometimes gathered over its disk, and hid its guiding rays from many a wistful eye. Say even, if you will, that to some eyes it seemed once to be shooting madly from its sphere. Make every deduction which his bitterest enemies have ever made for any alleged deviation from the course which had been marked out for it by others, or which it seemed to have marked out for itself, in its path across the sky. Still, still, there is radiance and glory enough left, as we contemplate its whole golden track, to make us feel and acknowledge that it had no fellow in our firmament. We did not all and always agree with Mr. Webster. I certainly did not, for one. It seems but yesterday that, coming out of church of a Sunday morning at Washington, where for many months he had sat in my own pew, and a more humble and devout worshipper I have never seen, and when he had kindly informed me that letters from Boston announced that I should be in the Senate as his successor the next day, -as I was, I told him of my regret that I could not vote altogether -- as he might have voted, and avowed my purpose to support in the Senate the policy I had advocated in the House. I am not quite sure that the Marshfield Club would have welcomed me as a guest about that time. But I rejoice to remember that no admiration or affection for him- and I was conscious of the magnetism of both overcame the strength of my own conscientious convictions. - But did I imagine that his great mind had no convictions of its own, and that a poor miserable seeking for the presidency was the only motive which actuated him? Never for a moment. Did I sympathize with all or any of the violent denunciations which were poured out against him in so many quarters for his course in 1850? Never for an instant. I deplored them all, and did what I could to avert them. But charitable construction was an unknown element in the party politics of that period, and not on one side only, but on all sides. The fugitive slave law - which I am always more than willing to remember that, in the shape in which it was forced upon us, I voted against, and which Webster and Clay would gladly have had modified before its passage had maddened the whole country. Then was fulfilled for Webster, if for nobody else, the saying of Milton in the Agonistes: "Fame, if not double-faced, is double-mouthed, Let us rejoice, my friends, that on the white wing only, on this centennial birthday, his name is now cleaving the clouds. It is not necessary that we should consider him to have been infallible or immaculate. He would have rebuked his best friend for such an assumption. No man is infallible. No man is immaculate. But his faults and failings, such as they were, have often been grossly exaggerated at home and abroad, and I am glad of an opportunity of saying so, as a close witness of a large part of his career. Meantime, no nobler testimony can be found in our language, or in any language, than that which he has borne, as often as he could find an occasion, or could make an occasion, in life or at death, to the great truths of the Bible, to the great |